(Swans - November 21, 2005)
Michael Doliner's excellent article in the recent issue of Swans,"Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup", presents the game plan and
balance of forces as seen by the neo-conservative cabal in the White
House. Doliner considers their project in no way inevitable, but rather
an opportunistic mutiny cobbling together several not wholly compatible
interests (the rich, the military, the Christian right, portions of the
befuddled middle). He likens the venture to a paper ship launched on an
unstable sea (the witches brew of the title?) heading for a destination
only dimly grasped by the mutineers (whom he derisively calls "the
philosophers").

Doliner shows these disparate interests in dynamic relationship and
creates a plausible image of the future. Still, it's just one scenario among many. What are some others?

The leading alternative, in the public mind at least, would be a
revival of the opposition party, currently in a coma, but showing signs
of life in the person of "Give 'Em Hell Harry." The number one item on
the Democrats' new and improved national platform, "Honesty in
Government," has the potential of evolving from a specific complaint
about manipulation of intelligence (possibly too esoteric to be of real
interest to the general public), to either an outright demand for
impeachment or a broad attack on secrecy and cronyism in the current
administration. Certainly there are multiple scandals ready to come
clattering out of the closet, if the upstairs maids of the press ever
dare to open the administration's doors a crack.

If the Democrats were to regain the Presidency in 2008 (assuming Bush
doesn't stage some new emergency that frightens the electorate into
submission), what would the new Democratic coalition look like?
Presumably the position of the military would remain unchanged,
relieved not to be pursuing the dangerous chimeras of the neocons and
happy to return to its comfortable living as managers of digital warfare
and cushy colonial satrapies. The military was well taken care of under
the Democrats, given new overseas real estate in Eastern Europe and only
asked to flex its muscles periodically in riskless wars like the one in
Yugoslavia. It's hard to imagine that today's senior military officers
really look forward to policing American cities, as Bush hints they
will, or facing the challenge of making a respectable service from the
new recruiting pool of non high school grads. The comfortable and
privileged overseas bases that Chalmers Johnson describes in The
Sorrows of Empire seem more like country clubs than military installations, marks of a
bureaucratic caste more interested in living well than grubbing around in the desert.

Doliner sees the rich, symbolized by Bush Senior, as only half-hearted
members of Junior's coalition, nervous about the rashness and
messianism of the prince, but unwilling to openly challenge him. The
rich, in the sense of idle managers of portfolios rather than active
managers of corporate enterprise, often seem to play a comical role in
affairs, as in the Hunt brothers' attempt to corner the silver market
several decades ago. They tend to be cheap, too, serving discount wine
when they don't need to, and are probably chafing at Junior's
indifference to the value of their treasury notes. At the same time, the
rich can actually look at gloomy scenarios like Peak Oil with a certain
equanimity, confident that their multiple investments in multiple
countries will protect them against the worst effects. So the rich will
continue to look on from the sidelines, comfortably insulated from harm.

The hard-working corporate rich are also just as happy with Democrats as
Republicans, having used both to escape the bonds of national law for
the wide-open spaces of unregulated global trade. These in fact are the
players who will drive the history of the next thirty years, using
whichever party is in power to advance their agenda.

The role of political parties in the U.S. is to create coalitions of
disparate parts of the electorate so that they can gain office and serve
the interests of the powerful few. The current Republican coalition
seems as improbable as any, combining Christian fundamentalism, the
lumpen mass, the threatened middle class and the hedonistic rich, under
the tutelage of empire-dreaming, elitist, Straussian philosopher kings.
Traditional conservatives blanch at this unholy alliance, but so far
it has worked. It works, according to Doliner, partly because of the
skillful propaganda of arch-manipulators like Rove.

The Democrats have been weak of late, in the propaganda area, trying to
fashion a stance in the middle that will still appeal to the left. It's
interesting, if depressing, to speculate what the new Democratic
platform might be. In the mouths of Senators Clinton, Biden, Bayh and
the like, progressive rhetoric will only sound deeply cynical. Yet,
there are possibilities. The Democrats could revive their Rooseveltian
heritage of activism and idealism in government and rally significant
segments of the population around a national renewable energy program,
such as the Apollo Alliance, presenting it as a better response to
terrorism, a true component of national security, a powerful initiative
of global transformation, and a major jobs and economic stimulus
program. They could tie it into action on global warming and climate
change, and present themselves as enlightened rationalists after eight
years of conservative do- and know-nothingism. Such a program would also
have the hidden but important benefit of diverting some of the bloated military budget
to constructive ends, without threatening the military contractors
themselves (who will remain the suppliers of choice in any renewable
energy program.)

If it plays well in the 2008 elections, the Democrats could ride their
new campaign against corruption in government to several showcase
initiatives aimed at revolving door employment, no-bid contracts,
stricter auditing of government contracts and better electoral and
voting procedures. Now that Bush's attempt to kill Social Security has
been soundly rejected by the electorate, and the reality of its Medicare
Drug benefit is plain for all to see, it would seem good politics for
the Dems to propose something that actually strengthened Social
Security, along with a real drug benefit aimed particularly at seniors.

Finally, to mollify the left, they could reverse most of the provisions
of the Patriot Act, undo some of the grosser attacks on the environment
and the tax code, and re-re-organize FEMA, Homeland Security and the
national intelligence apparatus, to make everyone feel more secure.

On the international scene, the Democrats are stuck with the tar baby of
Israel, but it's conceivable that they could loosen the grip of the
right on Israeli politics and forge some kind of center/left coalition
that would allow the creation of a real Palestinian state. On that
basis they might lay the foundations for a somewhat stable Middle East.
On the other hand, it is unlikely they will do anything about the war
in Iraq, whatever is left of it, except support whatever client state,
or states, have emerged after eight years of neocon bungling.

The Democrats could put together a platform and ideology to answer the
termite-riddled one of the Republicans, and rally a large enough
constituency to regain power. But their power will be limited by three
realities: control of the economy will still be in corporate hands, or
beyond anyone's control, if Peak Oil arrives as predicted; Democratic
programs will still be middle-class programs, at a time when the middle
class is crumbling, and the needs of the poor will continue to be
unaddressed; and the weakness of the economy, after eight years of
profligate Bush management, will put the funding of any major government
programs out of reach, except for perhaps some mainly symbolic
initiatives.

There's nothing theoretically wrong with basing a platform on the needs
of the middle class; the middle class is, after all, the main bank of
accumulated skills and political energy in the society. But any party
that depends on the middle class will also have to embrace its anxieties
about loss of status and security as suburban lifestyles slowly
crumble. Republicans have pandered to those anxieties; Democrats, if
they wish to be more than Tweedledum to the Republicans' Tweedledee,
need to transform them into something bigger and more creative by
incorporating them into a broader vision of the nation's resources and
challenges.

As observed above, the real actors of the coming years, the ones who
will create the realities to which political parties have to respond,
will be global corporate capital. The rest of us are essentially
spectators, watching by the side of the road as the corporate behemoth
hurtles down the highway toward who-knows-what global collision. While
global capital writes the plot, political parties are merely stagehands
awaiting their assignments, changing trade policies, devaluing
currencies, sending armies here and there, easing out governments who
aren't cooperative, in the tried and true patterns of the past.

Unlike the threat of terror, more exploited than understood by the Bush
administration, the threat of rebellion from the south, by states like
Venezuela, will be serious and undeniable, and no political party will
be able to ignore it without being hammered by the opposition. The
Democrats will continue to be co-drivers of the national security state,
wasting a large part of our national treasure on its maintenance.

After global capital, the other possible scenario-creators are Peak Oil
and global warming. As James Howard Kunstler observes in The Long
Emergency, these, when they come, are likely to tear apart the social
fabric and far exceed any government's ability to deal with them.
Economic collapse, accompanied by food, power, and water shortage, will
spawn all kinds of nativist, fear-based, apocalyptic ideologies that
could drown democracy in a flood of irrationalism. Some see this
condition as already present and label it an early stage of fascism. In
Kunstler's extreme scenario, it's not even clear there will be a strong
central state to embody it.

Will a Democratic ship make the passage through these perilous waters
smoother than the Republican one? It's hard to say. At least we can
hope a Democratic administration will smother the creepy marriage of
rapturist thinking with the military embodied in characters like General
Boykin, whose finger is awfully close to the nuclear trigger already.
If they don't, Bush's real crime against humanity would be to have let
that particular genie out of the bottle.

Now, go back and read Doliner again, and decide which scenario you
believe! Or make up your own!

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